“But …” I shook my head. “No, that’s what that gang was doing. You were the one who stopped them.”
“It was a coincidence,” Wanderer said, his voice sneering at my shocked expression. “What, you think I came to this dump of a city because I decided to be some hero? For who? A bunch of people I don’t care about? For you? I wanted to go home! I care about my family!”
I jerked back as if I’d been slapped, and for all intents and purposes, I might as well have been. An inner voice inside my head was screaming that he was lying, that it didn’t make sense, that there was something that I was missing. But the real me, the conscious, honest part of myself, knew that he was telling the truth. I’d seen the reports. I’d read the summaries. The criminals that he’d captured had claimed that they’d never taken anything, that someone else had to be responsible for the thefts. The evidence had been stacked against them, and it had been an open-and-shut case.
All because a vigilante in power armor had stopped them. We’d never questioned it. Criminals always claimed innocence.
Even when they were innocent.
I rose from my seat, acutely aware of Wanderer’s visor following me as I walked around the rear of his ship and towards the back of the storage unit, where I’d noticed the smaller, tarp-covered masses only a few minutes earlier. I wrapped my fingers around the side of one, gathered up a fistful of plastic-like fibers in my hands, and tugged them aside.
My heart fell as I saw the machinery that had been concealed beneath it. Up until that moment, some part of me had still been holding out a hope that Wanderer had simply been lying, trying to drive me away from his story for whatever reasons with outlandish tales of time travel and faster-than-light travel.
But this? What I was looking at beneath the tarp? There was no stepping back from that. Whether or not the whole story he’d given me was true or not, one thing was certain.
The device I was looking at was one of the multimillion-dollar pieces of scientific equipment that had been stolen from the labs where Wanderer had made his first appearance. I recognized it because I had poured over those reports hundreds of times. I knew exactly what the stolen equipment looked like.
Stolen by Wanderer. Not by some street gang.
I moved to the next covering and pulled it aside. Another piece of testing equipment, this one partially disassembled for some reason. But it was still recognizable enough that I knew what it was.
I turned away. I’d seen enough.
“Why?” I asked, clenching my hands into fists at my sides. I felt hurt, betrayed.
Angry.
“Weren’t you listening?” he asked. “I wanted to go home.”
“You said it was impossible.”
“But I didn’t believe it,” Wanderer said, shrugging. “Would you? I thought that if I just worked at it, combined what I had with some of the tools from your era, I might be able to figure out a way to get home. So I stole some equipment. All I wanted to do was get home.”
“You stole,” I said. I was squeezing my fists so tightly my fingers hurt. I could feel my nails biting into my palm. “You were a thief.”
“So what?” Wanderer asked, rising once more and waving a hand in my direction. “I wanted to get home!”
“You’re a hero!” I shouted back. “People in this city look up to you!”
“I never asked them to!” he shouted back. His augmented voice overpowered mine, echoing off of the walls. “Do you think I ended up stranded here in the past, hundreds of years from my family, only to think to myself ‘I know, I’ll be a superhero?’ I’m a coward, Samantha. I ran from the war. I got myself moved to the logistics group based on my experience with shipping not because I was good at it, but because I didn’t want to die. I ran from that, too, when I almost got shot down. And then, when I got blown back in time, I didn’t do the proper thing and dive into the sun like I was supposed to. I ran from that, ran down to an under-developed little planet so I could try and find my way back.”
“I was never a hero,” he said, taking a step towards me. “I came here for one reason, and one reason only—to try and go home. To see my family again. You …” he said, stabbing a finger at me. “People like you made me out to be a hero. You wanted someone to look up to, and so you made me into one. You’ve been studying me, obviously, so you must have noticed I only go after certain types of criminals. Do you want to know why? Because they’re the ones I can rob. The ones that no one will give a second thought to. If I stop a mugger and fifty dollars happens to land in my pocket, no one bats an eye. They just assume the money got lost in the shuffle, and no one looks twice.”
I took a step back. My heart was racing again, but this time it wasn’t because I was nervous. It was because my whole world had just broken. Everything I’d ever thought about Wanderer, everything I’d ever hoped he would be …
All of it was lies. He didn’t care about us. He hadn’t picked us because of our crime rates, or because of our beleaguered police force. He’d picked us because we had something he wanted to steal. His activity fluctuated was based on how much money he was likely to make, not on how bad the crime was getting. Nothing I’d ever thought about him had been true.
He’d never been a hero at all. Just another criminal.
“You used us,” I said. “That’s all.”
“I did,” he said, and there wasn’t an ounce of shame in his voice. “I did what I needed to do.”
“You’re not a hero.” I felt like throwing up.
“No,” he said, crouching and picking up my recorder. He tossed it to me, and the path it took through the air almost seemed odd. It took me a moment to realize that my eyes were wet with tears. “I’m not.”
“I could tell people,” I said, gritting my teeth as I caught my recorder. “Expose you.”
“You won’t.” There was a smug tone to the way he said it. “Because if you do, I’ll just vanish. I’ll take my ship and go elsewhere. Your city will lose the hero it built for itself, and you? You’ll be the one who broke everyone’s dreams.”
“Like you broke mine?” I managed to growl. My throat felt hot and constricted, like it was being squeezed.
“You did that yourself,” Wanderer said, and I flinched.
He was right.
“You can go ahead and be the one who does that to everyone else, too,” he said. “You can wake them up. I don’t care. I’ll just have to go somewhere else. Or, you can stay quiet, and let everything rest like it is.”
I couldn’t take it anymore. I looked at him, wanting to lash out, wanting to pound my fist into the glass of his visor until it cracked and fell apart, until I could look him in the eyes and scream at him for lying to everyone for so long. For lying to me.
But I didn’t. I couldn’t, for starters. And because in a way, he was right. He might have run with the lie, but I’d been the one who’d built it so thoroughly.
Instead, I turned and walked out. It was all I could do. I managed to hold myself together as I got into my car, as I drove home. I made it all the way to my bedroom before I broke down sobbing, my body breaking as thoroughly as my dreams had.
I’d gotten the interview I’d always wanted, and in return had everything I’d built myself towards torn apart.
TEN
I called in sick for the next few days, barely leaving my apartment. On multiple occasions I considered making use of the interview I’d recorded, of throwing it out on the internet, cutting it up for my station to use, anything. I thought through and then discarded dozens of plans, rational thought pulling me back from the brink every time. Because as much as I hated to admit it, Wanderer hadn’t been lying about the city looking up to him. We’d turned him into a hero. Us. Me. And if I exposed that … I’d be doing to the rest of the city what he’d done to me. And deep down inside, I knew I’d be doing it not to expose the truth for what it was, but to try and get back at him for tearing my dreams apart.
Petty revenge, in other words. I’d be breakin
g the heart of every other kid who looked up to Wanderer just to get back at him.
It wouldn’t be right, and I knew it. None of my plans went through. In the end I wiped the recorders, both of them, and then overwrote the data with nonsense just to make sure it was gone. I couldn’t do it.
But by the same token, I wanted nothing to do with Wanderer anymore either. On the morning of my third day off from work, I woke up and immediately set about dismantling everything I’d ever built. The map came down from the wall, was torn into little pieces, and then disposed of in multiple garbage bins. The same for all my files, which I divided up and threw away at a variety of public dumpsters. Ever digital record I had was expunged, every recording or tape or picture was destroyed or thrown away. Even the long-standing alerts on my phone were eliminated. I would no longer get notifications if Wanderer made an appearance in the news. I wiped my accounts on online message boards.
I was done. Two days of broken-hearted betrayal followed by a weekend of vicious cleansing. Wanderer was gone, out of my life. And that was how it was going to stay. I was sure of it.
That Sunday I called my mother. I told her that she’d been right. I didn’t go into any detail, nor did she ask for it. Just my acknowledgement that I’d gone too far was enough. She brought me dinner, and we talked long into the night. And I felt … better. Wanderer’s betrayal still stung. What he’d said had hurt, and hurt deep. He’d never cared.
But talking things out with my mother helped a little. A lot, actually. At the moment, she was the hero I needed, not anyone else. By the time Monday morning came I was ready to go back to work. I still didn’t feel quite like myself, but I wasn’t the wreck I had been. Besides, I wasn’t quite sure what “myself” really was anymore. I’d been focused on Wanderer for so long that cutting him out of my life made things completely different.
It took me some time to adjust back to being normal. My old friends were shocked the first time I contacted them and started catching up. To them it was unusual, and to be fair, it was to me as well. But I was reinventing myself, rediscovering what I’d missed while I’d been sucked into the pursuit of a lie, and so I kept at it. It was odd at first, but after a few weeks it was almost like I hadn’t left. I had friends once more. People I could spend time with.
I felt like my life was finally opening up, like I was walking into the sun for the first time in years. Life took on new shades. I found new hobbies to fill my time, new interests and talents that I’d missed out on. It was invigorating.
Even my boss was happy for me, though he was a little disappointed that my search had turned up no result. But he did let me keep the money I earned selling all the cameras back to the various pawn shops. Not that it was much. Still, it was better than being lectured for spending months hunting a story and coming up empty handed. Not that I would have cared. I felt good. For the first time in years, I felt free. I didn’t have to worry about being the one to find Wanderer … and for all I knew, maybe I wasn’t the first. Maybe I’d been second. Or third.
But I didn’t waste my time wondering about it. Instead I went back to spending time with my friends, catching up with my mother, or getting myself ahead at work. I still hurt inside, still had a void where my hero had ripped my heart out, but it wasn’t hurting as badly anymore. I was filling it in with other things, new things. I was moving on. Looking for something different to fill that hole.
I succeeded marginally. It took a few months for the hurt to fade, and it still never faded to the point where hearing about Wanderer wouldn’t bring up a painful sting across my insides. What he had done … what I had done … I couldn’t just erase it. I was going to hurt each time that reminder arose.
But what didn’t dull was the hole, the hollow point inside my chest. It was just … empty, like something had been pulled out of it and I hadn’t found something to replace it yet. As the months stretched on, moving towards a year, the empty, missing feeling stayed inside me. I couldn’t find a way to make it go away.
“It’s simple,” my mother said one night when I was visiting her and once again getting some good old fashioned, loving, straightforward—and brutal—advice. “You put a lot of yourself into that Wanderer fellow.”
“Mother,” I said, groaning as she dropped another dumpling onto my plate. It was a good thing I’d taken up kickboxing again. With all of my visits to my mother’s, if I hadn’t I would have been in danger of needing new clothes. “I really don’t want to talk about him.”
“Well, we aren’t, Sam,” my mother said, sitting down across the small table from me. “We’re talking about the fact that he isn’t in your life anymore.”
“Yeah,” I said, my mouth partway full of dumpling. “And I want to keep it that way.”
“No, no, no,” my mother said, giving her head the rapid-fire back and forth shake she did when I’d done or said something wrong. “You’re feeling odd because that hero was almost everything to you, and now that he’s gone, so are all the thoughts and feelings that came with it.” She reached out across the table and put her hand on my shoulder. “It’s not just that you’re angry at him—and unless I’m terribly mistaken, the reason you’re angry doesn’t matter either. It’s that he was a big part of your life. You know you used to come home from school with those little book forms and you’d always hunt over every one of them for anything that had to do with Wanderer.”
“I know,” I said. “And dad would help me.” It was a good memory, though looking back now, I almost felt as if I’d wasted our time.
“He would,” my mother agreed, nodding. “But you know what I’m thinking of right now?”
“What?” I asked.
“Of how you’d always talk about how good that Wanderer was. Now I know you don’t share the same feeling now, Sam,” she said, holding up her hands. “But what about all that good? You used to love that.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
My mother shrugged. “You put a lot of stock in that hero being out there and doing good things—whether or not he was actually doing them. Maybe the reason you’re feeling so down is because you had a lot of hope that there was someone out there making the world a better place, and you lost that when … well, whatever it was happened.”
I paused in mid-chew. “You’re saying I feel empty because I feel like there isn’t good anymore?”
“No,” my mother said. “I’m saying that maybe you feel like you need to do something good to fill that hole. You let someone else’s deeds fill it for a long time, but now that that’s gone, you feel empty.”
I swallowed. “Actually, that kind of makes sense.”
“Well, it’s not a sure answer,” my mother said, poking at her own plate.
“Oh?”
“I had a similar feeling at your age,” she said. “Of course, I knew your father, so—”
“And that’s enough of that topic,” I said, knowing exactly what was coming. “Sorry, mom, but no dice on that one tonight.”
“Fine,” my mother said, giving me an exaggerated pout. “But think about what I said, all right?”
I did … and for the most part, she was right. Once again. I had been missing something from my life. Maybe it was that felt like there wasn’t any good left in the city after Wanderer had so eloquently explained why he did what he did, or maybe it was that I had realized that there was more to what he did then the simple actions. Or maybe I thought that what I was doing was no longer enough. Whatever the case, though, I started acting on it.
I volunteered at a local soup kitchen first, though it didn’t help for long. I kept doing it—after all, they were shorthanded—but it was pretty obvious to me that we were for a number of people just putting Band-Aids over the problem.
So I started to get more personal, getting to know those I helped, spending more time with other service acts. It dug into my social life a little, but at the same time I felt like I was doing something for the city, even if it was small. And it certainly wasn’t smal
l to the people I was helping.
But it still didn’t fill the hole. It was a stop-gap, certainly, with its joys and its frustrations, but it was a stop-gap all the same. It wasn’t what I needed. I didn’t stop, but at the same time I knew I was missing something. I wanted to do more, and homelessness wasn’t our city’s biggest problem. Crime was.
But there was nothing I could do about that except keep my own life clean. I wasn’t in any shape to go out and put an end to some of the city’s problems. At least … not on my own.
I did start taking on more applicable news stories, though they became much harder sells with my superiors. Most of them wanted news that sold, not news that rocked the boat or made people think hard about things. But by increasing my workload a little I was able to get some leeway, and that filled the hole a little more.
It still wasn’t enough, but I was spread thin. There simply wasn’t much I could do with my position and what I had control over. I’d just have to be content that I couldn’t help the city as much as I wanted to.
That line tided me over until almost a year after I met with Wanderer, when I came home from a late evening at work to find a note on my table. It was short and to the point, written with an almost mechanical precision. It read:
Samantha,
I’m sorry. I need to meet with you at the earliest possible time.
W
I read the note twice, just to make sure I’d read it correctly. Then I tossed it into the garbage. Sorry didn’t cut it. He’d lived a lie, exploited it for his own gain … Thinking about it made me angry all over again. Not just because I’d been fooled, but because of what Wanderer could have done. He could’ve gone after the causes. But he didn’t, because he made his living on the seediest of the crooks. He was living off the crime.
I was a bit incensed that he’d apparently invited himself into my apartment, but at least he’d had the decency to do it when I wasn’t home, rather than doing something ridiculously creepy and absurd like breaking into my bedroom at night to talk. Then again, he was an admitted coward, and had anyone tried something like that I would have probably killed them, power armor or no. I didn’t keep a machete in a long-standing place over my door without good reason.
Unusual Events: A Short Story Collection Page 37
